An article about my ASIO file from the years 1982 to 1991 that I published in Overland in 2018 raised more general questions about ASIO’s surveillance efforts against the far-left. One reader asked me, “Did you ever work out who the informants were?” I can honestly say “No”, despite having access to the opened files at the National Archives Australia of Alec, David, Marcus, Martin, Rick, Theresa as well as my own.

On one level, I don’t care. It was forty years ago and the informer/s are all long gone in the wind.  Of course, however, there is a curiosity to find out what kind of person would be the type to be a spy on people who want to change the world.

I’ve had the opportunity to do some more research via John Blaxland and Rhys Crawley’s Official History of ASIO, Vols II and Vol III. This is what Blaxland has to say about the International Socialists (IS), of which I was and still am a member of (although we are now called Solidarity): “[The IS belongs in] [t]he fourth category…of those groups with a low capacity for and low threat of violence.”

Scrolling through the above-mentioned files, I think I have gained some insight on the modus operandi of ASIO types. 

ASIO is obsessed with certain key questions about any organisation and will go to any lengths, including illegal means, to get that information. Any member of a political group who is “overly interested” in these questions is someone to be wary of.   

Where is the money coming from?

Given ASIO thinks like a ruling class organisation, the first thing it is interested in is who is financing any group. Capital always thinks about where the capital is coming from.

The idea that the working class would want to overthrow its own “benevolent” capitalist class is so abhorrent to them that they think any move to overthrow them must be financed by a “foreign power”.

The other reason for this “foreign power” connection is to besmirch anyone opposed to Australian capitalism with the brush of receiving money from a real or imaginary foreign power.

In the early 1970s, Thomas Shepherd, a former ASIO informe who was interviewed in Overland in 2009, was asked to find out who was financing the Trotskyist Socialist Workers League. He said:

There were suppositions that they were being financed by the PLO, or that there was some dissident group in the Eastern Bloc that was financing them.

Ludicrously in 1985-6, the Victorian State Labor government accused the militant BLF union of receiving cash from Libya, the bogeyman nation of the 1980s. As Liz Ross’ documents in Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win! (2004), the allegations were thoroughly discredited by the very State-government “custodian” of the BLF’s sequestered finances. 

Finally, consider Labor’s Sam Dastyari and the Chinese Communist Party cash-connection scandal of 2017. ASIO gave no thought to the notion that the Australian working class could hate their rulers so much that they could liberate themselves, without the need for any “foreign money”.

Then there is the more mundane task of choking off any local benefactor from financing a socialist group. Hence, one of the ASIO informers in the IS was always diligently noticing the movements and reports of one of the early treasurers of the group, the late Jeff Goldhar.

Jeff attracted this comment in Rick’s file:

It is my opinion that he is the person who is acting as surety for the IS in respect of ‘Battler’ [newspaper] and ‘Fly-By-Night’ [printing company].

Two pages earlier, the informer mentions Jeff’s financial report,

with the most important statement being that the IS, at the moment, were in a financial crisis.

No surprises there. Socialist groups run on a shoe-string budget. The smaller the group, the smaller the budget. The same observant informer notes that Jeff’s solution to alleviate the crisis was for members on wages to increase their dues. 

The ASIO informer reveals how close and trusted they were:

Due to the fact that I was privy, together with other persons, to sight the finance requirement that emanated from Melbourne, I was able to confirm that the minimum wage assessed by the IS to enable the contribution to be …

In the Burgmann sisters’ book on ASIO, Kevin Cook writes in his file about the lead up to the protests at the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane in September 1982 and ASIO wanting to know “where people are trying to raise money to fund buses going to Brisbane for the games demos”.

The ASIO informer in Kevin’s “Issue Motivated Group”, as ASIO calls them, noted:

This group has a bank of $600, of which $340 is already committed to the costs of printing posters and handbills.

I mean, it’s simply scintillating reading seeing how cashed-up the Left is.

Membership — feat. illegal ASIO searches

According to Blaxland’s Official History, in January 1974 ASIO conducted an illegal search of the Socialist Workers League (SWL) premises in Sydney (today’s Socialist Alliance). They had no official search warrant or even what Blaxland calls “a clandestine entry warrant”.  

Named ASIO agent-in-charge Lawrie Pollard disingenuously said: “I would have applied for one but they didn’t exist”. So, he just went ahead and organised a break-in anyway.

When talking about ASIO surveilling Trotskyist groups in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Blaxland writes:

To penetrate these radical parties ASIO would need different, younger agents than it had traditionally used.

One of ASIO’s “new type” of young informer inside the SWL was finally rostered on as the night-watch of the SWL office when Pollard’s ASIO team was assembled and ready to illegally gather information.

Pollard said he just told the ASIO informer “a set of words” and the informer invited Pollard and his team inside. What Pollard’s illegal document search focused on was “proof of membership, financial evidence and minutes of meetings”.

Of the illegal search Blaxland writes:

As a consequence, ASIO had a comprehensive picture of the membership and workings of the SWL.

Part of the furniture: beware of party hoppers

Some informers belonged to more than one far-left party, and was closely trusted member and even a long-term member, as in the case of ASIO informer Phil Geri, who split his twenty-two years of service between the 1960s and ’70s between the CPA and then the CPA (Marxist-Leninist). 

Bizarrely, this saw him garner his own ASIO file, from other ASIO informers inside the CPA.

It was the emergence of the Maoist CPA (Marxist-Leninist) attracting New Left students during the Vietnam War and ASIO’s lack of informers in its cell structure that resulted in ASIO instructing Geri to hop from the CPA to the Maoists. 

There is even an award-winning stage-play about Geri’s life, entitled Cold War Confidential.

Another party-hopper was Max Wechsler, who joined the CPA in March 1973 and then moved onto the Socialist Workers’ League in February 1974. He trawled for those same things for his paymasters — finance and membership lists.

ASIO informer Thomas Shepherd was also asked by the agency to become a party hopper.

Always on call

Another trait of the informer is to always be “available to assist” — being on-call, volunteering all the time — to the point where they become “invaluable” to the group.

Having a plausible cover story for this availability is usually being “being self-employed”. Weschler cultivated his “availability” for the CPA and SWL.

Special warning to women

Male state-paid informers, “in order to maintain their cover”, were known both in Australia but more so in the UK to start relationships with women members of issue protest groups or left groups.

The experience of Penny Lockwood, from a CPA family but never a CPA member herself, is noted in the Burgmann sisters’ history of ASIO files of the 1960s activists. Blaxland’s Official History makes no mention of it, even though the Burgmann sisters’ book was published a year earlier.

In Penny’s case, an ASIO informer started a relationship with her in 1967 which continued for almost a year. As the Burgmann sisters document, it seems ASIO wasn’t too happy about the informer’s actions. But it’s important to warn that it can happen.

The British experience of “spy cops” starting relationships with women, and even having children with them, is part of a more ruthless and disgusting UK policing policy. That scandal led to the creation in 2015 of the UK Undercover Policing Inquiry, currently chaired by Sir John Mitting.

The unelected parts of the state machine — the secret service, top public servants, police chiefs and so on — see the defence of the state as central to the capitalist system that it rests upon.

They understand that everything that strengthens the confidence and determination of working-class people to fight threatens their whole rotten system. That’s why they spend so much time and money spying on our movements. Our best response is to keep up the fight against the system the spymasters defend.